At the Wester Hailes Community Herbal Medicine Clinic winter is the time that we catch up with ourselves and our stocks of medicines for the year to come. We try and make as many of our own tinctures as we can, and ideally use local ingredients foraged or grown from within Edinburgh, but we also order in herbs from suppliers too.
Over the autumn & winter so far we have done a few medicine making sessions, collaborating with Organic herb supplier Solar Ripe whose herbalist Simone Clarke is going to be working on medicine making with us. We were lucky to be donated a harvest of locally grown Hops (Humulus lupulus) from one of the neighbourhood’s community gardens – the Calders Green Shoots – and also some Passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) from the West Highland Herbalist’s Gardens which we turned into fresh tinctures for the clinic. We also made Oat berry, Chamomile, Liquorice, and Aspen tinctures which we’ll be decanting this month in January.
This year in 2018 we’ll be more actively growing, foraging and making our own medicines, hopefully with lots of input from local Wester Hailes residents. We are currently looking for funding to run herb growing & medicine making projects with lots of local enthusiasm & spirit.
